Event Detail

Please register for attendance here.

This work is part of a decolonizing project—an endeavor that I maintain to be both collective and personal. Colonial history and social science habituated Indians intellectuals to two questionable certitudes. The first was the radical dissimilarity between modern social theory and pre-modern philosophical traditions of other, colonized societies. A second prejudice was the radical inferiority of pre-modern traditions in thinking of solutions to modern human life. In this lecture I shall try to contest both these prejudices by using an analysis of two great traditions of Indian aesthetic-social philosophy: the Upanishads, and Vaisnava theology and poetry.

First, I shall conceptualize paradise as human life without suffering, and claim there is no human world without a paradise. I shall further argue that specific, divergent conceptions of paradise have been at the center of different stages of Indic aesthetic philosophy, starting from the Upanishadic definition of wonder at the universe as comprising of two different aspects – one of cognitive curiosity and another of aesthetic enjoyment. Human access of the universe is imperfect without a complementarity of these two types of wonder which give rise to science and aesthetics. Ultimately, I hold that modern secular thinkers can find significant resources of reflection about the human condition from this tradition.